Work

Captain's log: startdate 06111.15

Today was our first day of work. We woke up at 0730, had breakfast and then set out. We walked down the hill, and waited at the bottom for a trufi. A trufi is a car or minibus or any kind of vehicle which has been converted to hold as many people as humanly possible, they run set routes  pretty frequently and serve the purpose of buses, it costs around 20p to use a trufi no matter how far you go. They are usually pretty rammed, with 8+ people fitting in a normal sized car + the driver, and sometimes up to 17 in a minibus thing + babies + animals (I heard a story of a sheep sat on a seat like a person with it's hooves over the back of the seat in front, and another of a goat eating a ladies scarf, however I've never seen animals on them yet). So yeah we waited a bit and then got in the first trufi that turned up. At first I didn't get a proper seat and had to sit on a bench with my neck at right angles for about 10 minutes, but then some space freed up and it was much better after that. It took us an hour door to door, so not bad, but not great either. I spent the journey thinking and making notes on the structure of objects I want to use in my Tron thing.

We started the work day off with a meeting in a mix of English and Spanish. There are no kids at that centre on Mondays, so I got put to work looking at the website. It's a wordpress site, which is massively out of date, and some of the plugins no longer function correctly. I didn't want to just update everything without making a backup first, so I spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to back everything up. I eventually succeeded in backing up the database, but I don't have the appropriate logins for the host, so I can't back up the site install. Nobody else seemed to have these details either, so that's the next mission.

The office didn't have water today because someone was cleaning something out in the street, and so there's no water until tomorrow ...

Around 1230 we went for lunch in a cafe thing not too far away. The choice was meat soup or different meat soup. I had the soup, as did Amy with the meat fished out. I followed this up with meat and rice, as the chicken and rice option didn't sound appealing (yes really, there was meat and rice or chicken and rice....). My meal was £1.20, and Amy's was 60p (as she didn't have the rice and ...), on the downside Amy fished out part of a chicken foot with a claw still attached....

We were then shipped off with one of the other new volunteers a Dutch girl, to alto buena vista, which meant taking two more trufis. We got a bit lost at the interchange, which was next to a bridge that collapsed a couple of weeks ago, and so it took about 2 hours to get there in the end, although it was meant to take around 90 minutes.

We arrived in alto buena vista which pretty much looked like a building site with random piles of rubble everywhere and the usual assortment of stray dogs. We found the centre and wandered in, at which point this mass of children descended upon us, giving us hugs and asking questions in Spanish, Amy disappeared leaving me to find them off and try and understand them. They kept giving me circus props to use, so they could gauge my abilities, I think they were impressed. A small girl of about 4 years instantly befriended me and proceeded to follow me around for the proceeding hour or so, continuously talking to me although I understood very little of what she said. We played skipping and then she sat on me while I showed her and the others my contact ball, which is now appropriately scuffed and scratched. They had a set of silks their, so I climbed that and did some things, there's no safety mat, it's just hanging above a concrete floor, so I was careful and didn't do anything too exciting. I think it went well, and all the kids seemed to like us, so that's nice.

Eventually they all disappeared and we were released, so we went and took another two trufis to get home, although first I went to a shop for some water, which came in a small bottle sized sealed plastic bag, kind of weird but apparently that's how water works there. It took us another hour or so to get home, in more overly cramped conditions.

So that was my day, lets see what tomorrow brings. Now I'm going to write some code, eat some food, and maybe have a beer.